Elections Russian-Style

Elections have been the central institution of representative government since at least the ancient Greeks. The story of the extension of the franchise to (eventually) all adult citizens, and the establishment of the principle that the only decisions that could bind them were ones that had been taken by a parliament they elected, is essentially the story of modern democracy. Elections have a much shorter history in Russia; but the changes that followed the October manifesto of 1905 led to four successive elections to a newly established State Duma, and in November 1917, after the Bolsheviks had taken power, there were elections to a Constituent Assembly that was intended to define the nature of a post-tsarist future. Elections continued under Soviet rule, although (from an early stage) they were not competitive, and the principle was at least formally confirmed that the only body that could take decisions that were binding on all citizens was a parliament they had themselves elected. It was the people to whom ‘all power belonged’, explained the 1977 Constitution, and they could exercise that power either directly, through a referendum, or indirectly, by electing representatives to the soviets of people's deputies that had the exclusive authority to legislate.

The same principles continued into the post-communist years, although (at least apparently) they had for the first time become genuinely meaningful. The only source of legitimate authority in the new federation was its ‘multinational people’, as in Soviet times, and the ultimate expression of their collective will was the ‘referendum and free elections’ (articles 3 and 4 of the Russian Constitution (Konstitutsiya 1993)). The new state, however, unlike its predecessor, was committed to ‘political diversity’ and ‘multiparty politics’ (article 13:3), and citizens had the right to establish associations of whatever kind in order to advance their various preferences (article 30:1). At the national level the Federal Assembly, with its two chambers, was the ‘representative and legislative organ of the Russian Federation’ (article 94); both were directly elected in 1993, when the new constitution was adopted, and since then the lower house, the State Duma, has continued to be elected at the regular intervals that are specified in the constitution (see Table 1). Following constitutional amendments at the end of 2008 the Duma was in future to be elected for a five-year term, from 2011 onwards, and the president for a six-year rather than four-year term, from 2012 (‘Ob izmenenii’ 2009); elections were to take place at more frequent intervals in the republics and regions, and to bodies of local self-government.

TABLE 1 
State Duma Elections, 1993–2007

Date	Party list seats	Single-member constituency seats	Party list threshold (%)	Party list contenders	Party list winners	Turnout (%)^a
						‘Voted’	‘Took part’
12 December 1993	225	225	5	13	8	n.d.	54.81^b
17 December 1995	225	225	5	43	4	64.38	64.73
19 December 1999	225	225	5	26	6	61.69	61.85
7 December 2003	225	225	5	23	4	55.67	55.75
2 December 2007	450	–	7	11	4	63.71	63.78
Notes: ^ashows respectively those who ‘took part in the voting’ by casting a valid or invalid ballot, and the slightly larger number who ‘took part in the election’ by receiving a ballot paper but not necessary using it (which was the formal criterion for establishing the validity of an election until the law was amended in April 2007 and the turnout requirement was removed). In both cases slightly different numbers took part in the single-member constituency and party-list elections (in 2003, for instance, 55.3% of the registered electorate cast ballots in the single-member constituencies, but 55.7% in the party-list contest); the totals reported are for the party-list contest in every case. In 2007 voting was exclusively by party list so there was no discrepancy.
^b Vybory (1996, p. 52). The official communiqué reported the number who had cast a valid ballot in the party-list election, but not the number who had cast an invalid ballot or ‘taken part in the election’ by receiving a ballot paper. The turnout figure that was made public was for the number who had ‘taken part’ in the vote on the draft constitution and is the basis of the figure reported above, which must accordingly be regarded as no more than an approximation to the number who had ‘taken part’ in the Duma election: Byulleten' Tsentral'noi izbiratel'noi komissii Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1, 12, 1994, p. 28.
Source: Official communiqués of the Central Electoral Commission, including subsequent revisions, a comprehensive archive is maintained at the Commission's website, available at: http://www.cikrf.ru/banners/vib_arhiv/.

The formal arrangements that are made for a Russian election are very similar to those that are made in other countries, including the Western democracies. Under the law that governed the 2007 Duma election, the entire exercise was to take place ‘openly and transparently’ (‘O vyborakh’ 2005, article 9). Ordinary citizens as well as parties and public bodies had the right to conduct ‘pre-election agitation’, and the parties that had put forward lists of candidates were ‘guaranteed equal conditions of access to the means of mass communication’ in order to do so (article 10). The information that was made available during the campaign had to be ‘objective’ (‘O vyborakh’ 2005, article 10), journalists who were covering the election could not be dismissed or transferred to other duties without their agreement (article 51), and no opinion polls could be published in the five days beforehand that might improperly influence the outcome (article 53). There could be no ‘bribing of the electorate’ in any form that that did not arise directly from the performance of campaign duties (article 62), nor could there be appeals to vote against other parties or attempts to damage their standing by negative publicity (article 63). There were related arrangements, of a kind that are familiar elsewhere, for free broadcast and printed advertising (articles 57–59) and for election spending (articles 63–71).

Russian elections have nonetheless been regarded with an increasing degree of scepticism by scholars and international monitors, and for a variety of reasons. In part, it was a matter of the changes that had taken place in the election law over the years of the Putin presidency: in particular, the elimination of the single-member constituencies that had originally returned half of the Duma's 450 members, but which had been less easy for the central authorities to manipulate. The raising of the threshold for Duma representation from 5% to 7% had originally been agreed in 2002 but came into effect for the first time in December 2007. At the same time the right to nominate candidates was progressively restricted until in December 2007 only nationally registered political parties were able to do so, and without allowing them to combine into a larger bloc of the kind that had contested all previous elections. The right to vote ‘against all’ was abolished in 2006 and, in the spring of 2007, the minimum turnout requirement was also abolished.1 Direct elections to the governorships of the 80-odd republics and regions had already been abolished at the end of 2004, and the president could dismiss any of these chief executives, whatever the basis of their original appointment, if at any time he ‘lost confidence’ in them.

The changes that were taking place in the law itself were a part of a wider environment in which the scope for autonomous political action was being progressively diminished.2 One of the most important of these changes was the control that had been established over the national media, symbolised most clearly in the takeover of the independent television channel NTV by armed guards acting for the state-owned gas monopoly Gazprom in the spring of 2001. There were related moves against the ‘oligarchs’, establishing the principle that private property and even enormous accumulations of wealth were acceptable but on the strict condition that those who possessed them had no independent political ambitions (if not they would be imprisoned or forced into exile). At the same time non-governmental organisations were regulated more closely than ever before, reflecting the Kremlin's view that they had been used as agencies of Western influence in the ‘coloured revolutions’ that had taken place in other post-Soviet republics. A ‘party of power’, United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya), had meanwhile been confected, and with the Kremlin's open support it won a plurality and then a two-thirds majority of seats in the 2003 and 2007 parliamentary elections. It was, in turn, one of the parties that nominated Dmitri Medvedev for the 2008 presidential contest.

There was no reason to doubt that United Russia was a genuinely popular choice, in large measure because it was ‘Putin's party’. At the same time, party leaders were clearly determined to ensure that it provided them with not just an overall but a two-thirds or ‘constitutional’ majority in the Duma, and positions of comparable advantage in regional legislatures. A number of distinctive mechanisms became established in order to ensure the regular achievement of these objectives. One of the most important was ‘administrative resource’, or the power of office itself. It was a term that had apparently first been used at the time of the 1995 Duma election by think-tank director Dmitri Ol'shansky (Levchenko 2009, p. 34); it could be defined as the ‘combination of means at the disposal of the directors of enterprises and/or territorial units (districts, towns) to influence the opinion and behaviour of electors’ (Vorontsova & Zvononsky 2003, p. 114), or as the ‘organisational, financial, human, time and other resources of state bodies and the government administration’ that could be ‘used for the achievement of various political objectives’ (Levchenko 2009, p. 35). It was, moreover, a legitimate form of influence, in that it was normally based on powers that those who held such positions had every right to exercise (Levchenko 2009, p. 36).3

Regional leaders, for instance, might allow their names to be included in a party's electoral list, but they retained the right not to take up their seats. In the event, all the parties lost deputies in this way in December 2007; but United Russia lost as many as 113, which was more than a third of all the seats it had been awarded, including the Russian President as well as all but one of the governors—the so-called ‘locomotives’—who had lent their authority to its list of candidates.4 An amendment to the election law in April 2007 allowed them to resume their seats at a later date if another deputy from the same party stood down (‘O vnesenii’ 2007c). Public officials were not allowed to use the advantages of their position for the purpose of campaigning, and were relieved of their normal duties; they could make no use of their office staff in working hours, or of their premises, means of communication and transport, or access to the media (‘O vyborakh’ 2005, article 46). This provision, however, did not apply to federal ministers or governors under a change in the law that had been ‘almost unnoticed at the time’ (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 39), and which involved the disappearance of the ‘category A’ positions to which they had earlier belonged. Those who campaigned against the Kremlin's favoured candidates were, in effect, campaigning against the state itself.

‘Administrative resource’ could also be used to disadvantage less Kremlin-friendly parties and candidates. In Nizhnii Novgorod, for instance, Western journalists found that mechanisms of this kind had been used to establish what was effectively a ‘one-party state’. The Union of Right Forces (Soyuz Pravykh Sil) leader Boris Nemtsov, who had been governor in the 1990s, found himself called ‘everything from a corrupt bureaucrat to a traitor’ on national television, while a leafleting campaign in the city itself claimed his party supported gay rights and employed canvassers with AIDS (neither was true). Businesses were persuaded by state officials to discontinue their financial support and a confidential list of party members was obtained, with what appeared to be the covert assistance of the security services, after which ‘hundreds of menacing phone calls were made to volunteers, saying they or their families would be hurt if they helped [it]’. The party was refused advertising space on ‘everything from billboards to newspapers to television’, and when Nemtsov himself tried to hold a public meeting he was unable to rent a hall. Police meanwhile visited the local office of the independent newspaper Novaya gazeta, which had criticised the governor and mayor, accused it of using unlicensed software and confiscated its computers, closing it down until after the election. Two other local papers were also forced out of business or found it impossible to distribute their print run (Levy 2008).

Given Russia's enormous territorial extent, it was no less important to be able to use the means of mass communication to reach the widest possible section of the electorate. This, first of all, meant television; and since television was effectively controlled by the authorities themselves (or by powerful commercial interests), it meant a national television coverage that was overwhelmingly concerned to show the Kremlin in a positive light and its opponents more negatively, if at all. The most extensive study of its kind over the 2007–2008 election cycle was undertaken by the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES), which is affiliated to the Russian Union of Journalists. They found that United Russia had 10 times as much coverage over the pre-election period as its main challenger, the Communist Party (Kommunisticheskaya partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii, KPRF), which in turn had less coverage than A Just Russia (Spravedlivaya Rossiya) and the Liberal Democrats (Liberal'no-demokraticheskaya partiya rossii), both of which were Kremlin-friendly but in some danger of falling below the electoral threshold (Table 2). Another service, Medialogiya, found that United Russia had two or three times as much coverage as the Communist Party over the last week of campaigning;5 the Communist Party itself claimed that United Russia had 70% of all election coverage, leaving just 11% for its closest competitor.6 Either way, these were grotesque disparities.7

TABLE 2 
Television Coverage of the Duma Campaign, 1 October–22 November 2007

	United Russia	A Just Russia	LDPR	KPRF	Others
State channels
First Channel	19	2	2	2	3
Rossiya	20	3	4	3	7
TV-Tsentr	32	5	5	2	6
Private channels
NTV	19	4	2	1	1
REN-TV	22	10	9	10	13
Note: based on an analysis of prime-time news between 1 October and 22 November 2007; other political actors (above all the president and Council of Ministers) account for residuals. Coverage was also classified as ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ or ‘negative’. First Channel, Rossiya and TV-Tsentr were largely or entirely state-owned; the state energy monopoly Gazprom was the main shareholder in nominally private NTV; 70% of the shares in REN TV were held by two Kremlin-friendly companies, Severostal' and Surneftegaz, and 30% by the RTL Group.
Source: adapted from www.memo98.cjes.ru/?p=3&sm2=on&reports=200711, last accessed 5 January 2011; rounded percentages.

It was a very similar story during the period before the presidential election in March 2008. According to the CJES, Dmitri Medvedev had up to 43% of the news coverage on the main national television channels; none of the other candidates, on any channel, had more than 10% (Table 3). The Centre concluded that state broadcasters ‘had not carried out their legal obligation to create equal conditions for all the candidates’ and had been ‘prejudiced in favour of Dmitri Medvedev, both in the amount of time that had been allocated to him and in the tone of its coverage’; NTV, a commercial broadcaster, had also been ‘obviously biased’ (Tsentr ekstremial'noi zhurnalistiki 2008). Medialogiya reached somewhat different conclusions, at least in part because their analysis extended over a longer period. In this case it was the former prime minister, Mikhail Kas'yanov, who was found to have been the most frequently reported, but generally (52%) in ‘negative’ terms; Dmitri Medvedev, by contrast, was much more likely to have been shown in a ‘positive’ (29%) than a ‘negative’ (2%) context.8 Medvedev himself declined to take part in any of the studio debates, and when he took a day off in late February to address an audience in Nizhnii Novgorod it was carried repeatedly on national television without being regarded as a campaign activity.9

TABLE 3 
Television Coverage of the Presidential Campaign, 2–25 February 2008

	Medvedev	Zyuganov	Zhirinovsky	Bogdanov
State channels
First Channel	32	3	3	1
Rossiya	26	7	7	1
TV-Tsentr	35	4	2	1
Private channels
NTV	43	1	1	0
REN-TV	21	21	22	6
Note: based on an analysis of prime-time news between 1 October and 22 November 2007; other political actors (above all the president and Council of Ministers) account for residuals. Coverage was also classified as ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ or ‘negative’. First Channel, Rossiya and TV-Tsentr were largely or entirely state-owned; the state energy monopoly Gazprom was the main shareholder in nominally private NTV; 70% of the shares in REN TV were held by two Kremlin-friendly companies, Severostal' and Surneftegaz, and 30% by the RTL Group.
Source: adapted from www.memo98.cjes.ru/?p=3&sm2=on&reports=200803, last accessed 5 January 2011; rounded percentages.

Did any of this matter? It was certainly clear that, in earlier Duma elections, support for pro-Kremlin parties and candidates had been very closely related to a propensity to obtain political information from state-controlled television, particularly the First Channel; and as far as this could be established, state television had an independent impact on electoral outcomes, although it was also true that voters who were already pro-Kremlin were likely to prefer it (White et al. 2005). The same associations were apparent during the period that led up to the 2007 parliamentary election, although the causality remained complex. It was clear, first of all, that United Russia voters were more likely to trust state television (26% did so ‘largely’ or ‘entirely’, compared with 22% of all voters and 20% of the entire electorate). They were also more likely to think television coverage of the election campaign had been ‘fair’ (27% of United Russia voters took this view, compared with 21% of all voters and 19% of the entire electorate); and when it came to assessing the factors that had influenced their choice, United Russia voters were again more likely to indicate that television and the other mass media had been important than voters as a whole or the entire electorate (17, 15 and 11%, respectively).10

The heavily Kremlin-dominated nature of the electoral mechanism that was apparent in such calculations led to a more sceptical view of the entire exercise: one in which there remained an element of unpredictability, but which all the same insisted that these were not elections as they were understood in (for instance) Western democracies. For some, they were not ‘elections’ at all: for the jurist and former deputy Viktor Sheinis they were an ‘imitation of elections’ (2008, p. 51), for Myagkov and colleagues they were a ‘charade’ that was heavily reminiscent of the party-dominated exercises of the Soviet period (2009, p. 272). For perhaps a larger number, however, they were a distinct type of elections that reflected the distinctive nature of the political system in which they took place: one in which the courts, the media and secondary associations of all kinds had a degree of autonomy and the elections themselves were formally competitive, but in which the central authorities could rarely be challenged directly and certainly not on equal terms. These, some suggested, were ‘authoritarian elections’, a form of ‘unfree competition’ in which the ‘institutional façades of democracy, including regular multiparty elections for the chief executive’, were used to ‘conceal (and reproduce) [the] harsh realities of authoritarian governance’ (Schedler 2006, p. 1).

What were some of the distinctive features of elections of this kind, as the world's largest country entered the second decade of a new century?

Assessing election quality on the ground

There was no observer mission from the OSCE in 2007 or 2008, as there had been in earlier years (they had not, in their view, been offered an acceptable basis on which to conduct their inquiries), but there were missions from other international organisations, including the Commonwealth of Independent States, and election officials from many of the former Soviet republics as well as Hungary, Mongolia and Japan. In the end, 299 international observers were formally accredited in December 2007, and 235 in March 2008 (Vybory 2008a, pp. 455–56; 2008b, p. 288); at earlier elections there had typically been more than 1,000 and in December 2003 there had been 1,168, including more than 400 from the OSCE alone (Vybory 2004, p. 307). Observers from the other ex-Soviet republics were generally very positive in their assessments: any shortcomings were ‘not systematic’, reported the Inter-parliamentary Assembly of the CIS, and the election itself had been ‘open and free’.11 The Parliamentary Assemblies of the Council of Europe and the OSCE, by contrast, described the election as unfair, although they did not directly question the outcome or the legitimacy of the new legislature (‘Russian Duma elections’ 2007).

The most detailed monitoring was undertaken by ‘Golos’ (Vote), an independent body that had been established in 2000 for the ‘defence of the rights of Russian electors and the development of civil society’. Golos was able to undertake a long-term examination of the 2007 Duma election that began in July and lasted up to polling day itself, using a network of activists in 40 of the country's regions and republics and drawing on the testimony of party representatives, non-governmental organisations and electoral commissions as well as individual citizens who had made use of its ‘hot line’ facility to report infringements (Golos 2008a, p. 7). On polling day itself Golos coordinated the work of 2,500 activists at more than 20,000 polling stations across the country, which was about a fifth of the total, from the opening of the ballot boxes at 08.00 until the final protocols had been signed (Golos 2007, p. 1). It mounted a similar exercise at the time of the 2008 presidential election, using similar methods (Golos 2008b). Golos and its local monitors drew attention to a whole series of mechanisms that allowed the Kremlin to exercise a disproportionate degree of influence on the outcome of an election that was at the same time relatively free of obvious violations at the level of individual polling stations, and the account that follows draws extensively on their testimony.

Electoral administration

One of the most important of these mechanisms was the network of electoral commissions, at the centre and at regional level, that were responsible for supervising the entire exercise. Under the framework law (‘Ob osnovnykh’ 2002), half of their membership was nominated by the local legislature and half by the local governor. At the start of the 2007 Duma election campaign there were 65 regional electoral commissions; 15 of them had new chairpersons, 27 had new deputy chairs and 26 had new secretaries (Golos 2008a, p. 7). According to the evidence that was gathered by Golos, the new commissions were especially remarkable for the ‘dominating role of representatives of the “United Russia” party’. Among the new commission chairs a particularly large proportion were former officers from law enforcement agencies and the armed forces, and former staff of regional administrations. In Tver' region, for instance, the long-standing chair of the local commission was replaced by the secretary of the regional security council; in the Nenets autonomous region the new chair of the commission was a police colonel; in Kabardino-Balkariya the new chair of the electoral commission had a background in the Procuracy; so did the new commission chair in Tyva; and there were many other examples (Golos 2008a, p. 8).

As well as the replacement of a whole series of experienced and well-respected commission chairs, many others remained in place although they had attracted a large number of legal challenges at the preceding regional elections in 2006/2007. One of these cases was in Sverdlovsk region, where the Central Electoral Commission decided to nominate the new chair of the electoral commission at a closed meeting and in spite of the vehement objections of A Just Russia and its leader, Sergei Mironov; the nomination was approved locally without an alternative and without a vote. The ‘most scandalous’ case was in Stavropol krai; A Just Russia and its allies had a majority in the local assembly, but the Central Electoral Commission appointed a new electoral commission that consisted exclusively of United Russia representatives. The deputies went as far as the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn this decision, but without success (Golos 2008a, p. 9). Again, there were many similar cases. Overall, analysis left no doubt of the ‘one-sided disproportion in the composition of the commissions in favour of “United Russia” representatives’; and although there were attempts to challenge the absence of political balance in the courts, ‘not a single case had a positive outcome’ (Golos 2008a, p. 11).

Electoral commissions at all levels come under the jurisdiction of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), formed jointly by the Presidential Administration, the Federation Council and the State Duma. The law had formerly insisted that all members of the CEC have a law degree, but this was replaced in January 2007 by the requirement that they need have no more than a higher ‘professional’ qualification (‘O vnesenii’ 2007a; the same provision was later extended to the chairs of electoral commissions at the regional level (‘O vnesenii’ 2007b)). This provided an opportunity for the Kremlin to engineer the resignation of the CEC's long-standing chair, Alexander Veshnyakov, in March 2007, and his replacement by Vladimir Churov, a physicist with no previous experience of electoral administration. Churov was however a Leningrad University graduate who had worked in the city's foreign relations department under the supervision of Vladimir Putin, and he had contributed extensively to the autobiographical study that was published shortly before the 2000 election as part of Putin's presidential campaign (Ot pervogo 2000, pp. 80–81, 85–86, 87–89, 94–95). He became known, among other things, for his ‘first law’, which was that the president was ‘always right’ (if it appeared otherwise it must be that Churov himself had failed to understand him and ‘would simply have to think about it a bit more’).12

One of the CEC's main responsibilities was to approve the lists of parliamentary candidates. The right to nominate had been increasingly restricted by successive versions of the election law, and from 2005 only registered political parties were able to exercise this privilege. The parties already represented in the Duma—United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and the Liberal Democrats—all made use of a new provision that allowed them to put forward a list of candidates without additional formality (‘O vyborakh’ 2005, article 39:2). Four other parties paid a deposit of R60 million (about $2.4 million at the prevailing rate of exchange); the remaining seven parties sought to register by collecting at least 200,000 signatures, of which no more than 10,000 could come from any single subject of the federation (article 39:3). At the same time no more than 5% of the signatures could be invalid (the previous limit had been 25%), and the CEC refused to register three of the parties that had sought to register on this basis because they were held to have exceeded the permitted margin.13 The former prime minister, Mikhail Kas'yanov, encountered the same difficulty when he sought to register his presidential candidacy the following year; the decision, he believed, had been ‘made by Vladimir Putin himself’.14 For whatever reason, it was the supporters of parties and candidates that represented at least a potential electoral challenge who appeared to have the greatest difficulty with their handwriting.

The parties and candidates that were permitted to stand, in fact, were often the creations of the Kremlin itself. This was most obviously true of United Russia, the third of the ‘parties of power’ the federal authorities had at various times established in order to extend their authority over elected institutions at all levels. Putin himself did not disguise that he had made a ‘most direct contribution’ to the party's establishment,15 and he headed its list of candidates at the 2007 Duma election even though he was not himself a member. It was no less important, for Kremlin ‘political technologists’, to establish spoilers that could take support away from their competitors; and so the left-nationalist Rodina was formed to contest the 2003 Duma election, and the nominally socialist A Just Russia to contest the following election in 2007. Rodina, commentators explained, had been ‘put together on the orders of the Kremlin to compete with the Communists’ (Ivanov 2008, p. 138). It was later absorbed into A Just Russia together with the Russian Party of Pensioners (Rossiiskaya partiya pensionerov), which was ‘under the de facto external management of the Presidential Administration’, and the Russian Party of Life (Rossiiskaya partiya zhizni), headed by Putin loyalist Sergei Mironov. Putin, it was reported, had personally approved the formation of the new alliance, whose aim was once again to ‘fight the Communists’ (Ivanov 2008, pp. 246, 248).

United Russia was the biggest spender in the 2007 Duma election, with a total recorded disbursement of R1,551 million (about $63 million at the prevailing rate of exchange). Of the other parties that secured seats in the new Duma the Liberal Democrats spent just over R622 million, A Just Russia about R720 million and the Communists a frugal R234 million; all the parties, taken together, spent about R3,812 million, or $155 million (Vybory 2008a, p. 204). In fact, although campaign finance remained an issue, the establishment of more effective central controls over the entire process meant that there was less need than there had been in earlier years to abuse the rules on election spending in order to secure the right result. It was equally clear that spending money was not the same as gaining seats. The ‘cheapest’ deputies were those of the KPRF, at R3.8 million each; United Russia's cost an average of R4.1 million, A Just Russia's R10.5 million and the Liberal Democrats' most of all, at R15.5 million each.16 The bigger parties were advantaged in other ways: for instance, the larger their vote, the greater the support they received from the state under the system that had been introduced in 2001 (‘O politicheskikh partiyakh’ 2001, article 33). Smaller parties were meanwhile placed in still greater difficulty by the requirement to return the cost of the newspaper and broadcast publicity they had received if their vote fell below 3% (previously 2%), and by the loss of their deposit if they failed to secure at least 4% (previously 3%) (‘O vyborakh’ 2005, articles 69.3, 66.9).

Campaigning for votes

The systemic advantages that were enjoyed by Kremlin-favoured parties and candidates extended into the conduct of the campaign itself. All the officials in the United Russia party list, Golos reported, had used the support of their office to conduct their activities, and there had been open agitation for United Russia in ‘virtually all’ their public speeches (2008a, p. 43). Golos observers found that the participation of state and municipal officials in the work of campaign teams had been one of the ‘most common violations’ of election procedures, with local administrations at all levels ‘converted wholesale into campaign headquarters of the United Russia party’. Officials who were members of the United Russia campaign team had been able to use their position to direct their subordinates to ‘take part in the campaign activities of the party and vote for it’, and there had been ‘numerous cases’ of forced attendance at its campaign events, with ‘doctors, entrepreneurs, rural workers, government administrators’ and others required to attend, and to do so in their working time. There was particular indignation in the Adygeya Republic when officials sent out instructions such that, not simply were stallholders in the local market to display United Russia publicity without charge, they were also expected to collect and put it up as the officials themselves were ‘too busy’ (Golos 2008a, p. 53).

No opportunity was missed to make use of public space to reinforce the United Russia message. In Petrozavodsk, for instance, ‘almost all the actions on the city's anniversary date were accompanied by “United Russia” symbols’ (Golos 2008a, p. 14). The winners of the annual sailing regatta were awarded their prizes in a televised ceremony that took place underneath a United Russia flag. On the anniversary itself the ‘stars of show business’ had been invited, with ‘free concerts by [singers] Vitas and [Nikolai] Baskov accompanied by United Russia symbols’. In Astrakhan' the party made use of the various building projects that had been organised to commemorate the city's 450th anniversary in 2008, and ‘every major construction site’, from the philharmonia to the youth theatre, was decorated with the ‘slogans and logo of United Russia’. In the Vladimir region United Russia held public events to celebrate the opening of sports grounds, new buildings and monuments, gave presents to pensioners (one invalid was lucky enough to receive a wheelchair paid for by party members themselves), carried out street polls, and monitored the quality of road repairs. There was an ‘abundance of street advertising’ in the regional capital, such as ‘Vladimir is the heart of “United Russia”’, and a profusion of ‘banners, billboards, advertising stands and hoardings’ (Golos 2008a, p. 14).

It was much the same in Kostroma, where United Russia representatives handed out flyers on the main street and the ‘whole town’ was plastered with slogans such as ‘United Russia—A Party of Real Action’ or ‘United Russia—National Projects’, a reference to the ambitious state programmes that had been launched in health and other matters (Golos 2008a). In Orel, billboards hailed the ‘new roads of the towns of United Russia’; in Krasnodar, the choice of Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics was celebrated as a victory for the governor and his party (Golos 2008a, pp. 14–15). In Chelyabinsk, as early as the previous June, the entire town had been covered with banners declaring that ‘the defence of childhood is a party programme’ and that ‘health is a party programme’. All the town's ambulances had United Russia symbols on them, and the regional administration distributed a party newspaper without charge to state institutions, colleges and universities (Golos 2008a, p. 15). In Orel, students were obliged to join the party itself. ‘They gathered us in one of the lecture rooms and told us that we should become members of the party’, Golos observers were told. ‘They said that higher educational institutions that had not achieved an appropriate level of United Russia membership would be deprived of funding’ (Golos 2008a, p. 43).

It was equally clear, on the evidence of Golos observers, that anyone who wished to challenge the central authorities would be at a considerable disadvantage, and perhaps at some personal risk. In Omsk, the security services carried out ‘prophylactic measures’, warning local activists of the legal consequences of any action they might take and interrogating a young man who had made a speech in which there had been harsh but entirely legitimate criticism of the regional ‘party of power’ (Golos 2008a, pp. 44–45). In Bashkortostan, the opposition paper Ufimskii meridian had to be distributed directly to its subscribers as retail sale had been ‘practically forbidden’ (Golos 2008a, p. 45). The Union of Right Forces encountered similar difficulties when a nationally coordinated action was organised to seize more than 14 million copies of one of its flyers on the grounds of its allegedly ‘extremist’ character, and on 7 November the printing works at which most of the party's election communications had been produced was obliged to close down (Golos 2008a, pp. 53–54). The police also visited Communist Party activists in their homes, carrying out searches and removing stocks of flyers and newspapers, and all across the country the party reported the seizure of printing equipment, intrusive tax inspections and the confiscation of its electoral communications (Golos 2008a, pp. 54–55).

Oppositional campaigners were also restricted by official actions of other kinds. In particular, public demonstrations were severely curtailed. Several opposition activists were detained at a ‘dissenters' march’ in St Petersburg on 25 November, and a Yabloko supporter was beaten so badly he had to be taken to a local hospital with suspected concussion. ‘Dozens of participants’ had been arrested the previous day at an opposition demonstration in Moscow (Golos 2008a, p. 56). In the Dagestan capital Makhachkala, a Yabloko parliamentary candidate was attacked by an unknown assailant and badly wounded; he died in hospital without regaining consciousness. There were other cases of the arrest of party candidates and activists in Yekaterinburg, Nizhnii Novgorod, Bashkortostan and Krasnodar (Golos 2008a). The demonstrations that did take place might be hindered by a ‘screeching noise from loudspeakers on top of a nearby building’, or by recordings of ‘loud, maniacal laughter’.17 One pro-Kremlin activist handcuffed himself three times to the car that belonged to ‘Other Russia’ (Drugaya Rossiya) leader Gary Kasparov;18 another tried to put a butterfly net over the head of Boris Nemtsov, who had also been arrested, with a sign saying ‘political insect’, and others still pelted him with condoms.19

Mechanisms of this kind allowed the central authorities to issue what were in effect directives to officials at lower levels of the system about the level of turnout that would be required and the share of the vote that should be secured by each of the parties and candidates. Party sources ‘who wished to remain anonymous’ told Nezavisimaya gazeta in the summer of 2007 that the Kremlin had been sending ‘target figures’ of this kind to regional leaders throughout the country, usually in oral form at personal meetings. Specific figures, according to the paper's sources, had so far ‘been set down only for United Russia’. The figures varied by region, but the ‘average target’ for the country as a whole was 50%. No figure had yet been issued for the Communist Party, although it was evidently intended that its traditional support in the ‘red belt’ south of Moscow should be transferred to the ‘new opposition’, represented by A Just Russia. Overall, however, the new faux-left party was ‘supposed to finish third, after the CPRF’, and Zhirinovsky's LDPR was supposed to ‘get about 7%’, which was the electoral threshold.20 In another version the Kremlin had apparently made clear to regional officials throughout the country that United Russia would be expected to achieve about 60% of the vote: ‘it could be more, but definitely not less’ (Ivanov 2008, p. 306).

Governors issued their own directives to lower-level officials on the basis of these guidelines, much as plan targets had been handed down in the Soviet period. In Khabarovsk, for instance, the governor had ‘explicitly directed his subordinates to ensure a turnout of at least 60%, a final tally of at least 70% for United Russia, and not more than 5% for the KPRF’ (the head of an electoral commission in Bashkortostan, according to the party, had committed suicide on the night the votes were counted after refusing to carry out an order from the republican authorities to make sure that United Russia won at least 93% of the total).21 It was the same at the time of the presidential election, according to Vedomosti. Regions had been ‘issued with their instructions’: in Samara region, not less than 75% were to vote for Medvedev with a turnout of not less than 50%; in St Petersburg the turnout and the vote in favour were to be ‘not less than the average for the whole country than had been recorded at the previous Duma elections’; and in Moscow Medvedev was to receive between 64% and 65%, or in other words the combined vote of the four parties that had agreed to nominate him.22

In effect, a set of mechanisms had been created that drove up the turnout at all levels, and at the same time helped to ensure that the ruling party and its candidates could secure the kind of support the Kremlin thought was necessary for its purposes. Local authorities, which had insufficient resources to meet the needs of their housing and municipal services, were ‘ready to promise even 100% turnout as long as their zeal [was] rewarded with funds for major repairs and the replacement of rusted-out pipes (including in their own villas)’. Regional leaders were more concerned about their own position, which now depended directly on the president: it was a matter of ‘personally signing your own death warrant’ if the figures were unsatisfactory, or ‘continuing to sit in the governor's seat undisturbed’. The national leadership had their own concerns, wondering what the president might have in mind when he spoke about the shortcomings of the ruling party and warned that ‘everything [would] depend on the election results’: there was ‘no room for error’, so the ‘percentage [had] to be pumped up as high as possible’. Even the top leadership had ‘fallen into a trap of [their] own making’ as if the election was a ‘referendum on Putin’, anything less than a high turnout and a convincing majority for his chosen party would be seen as a humiliation (Lipsky 2007, p. 2).

Voting (and counting)

Administrative resource had two main forms, according to the election specialist Andrei Buzin: ‘compulsion and direct falsification’. Compulsion was most often apparent during a campaign, when ‘the factory management [told] its workers to line up in columns and vote for the right party’; falsification was more likely to be favoured on polling day itself, including the vote count (Zalessky 2007, p. 17). One of the forms of compulsion that was most widely practised during the Duma campaign was indeed the organised pressure to vote. Yelena, for instance, the financial manager of a Moscow college, had been told by the rector that she and her colleagues would be expected to obtain absentee certificates and vote in the polling station attached to the college itself, and ideally to ‘bring all [their] family’. It was also made clear that they had to vote for Putin and United Russia, ‘and the higher the percentage, the greater the likelihood [the college's own] funding [would] be increased’. Staff who objected were offered a ‘compromise’, by which they could hand in their absentee certificates on the Friday and stay at home on the Sunday. ‘There was nothing like this kind of pressure in Soviet times’, she told New Times indignantly.23

Students came under particularly heavy pressure. There was, it emerged, a ‘standard methodology’ by which those who lived out of town were given the day off so that they could travel home and collect an absentee certificate, after which they were added to the electoral register in another polling station, ‘as a rule, the polling station located inside the institution itself’ (Golos 2008a, p. 64). At Bryansk State University faculty deans were reportedly on duty in the polling station itself, taking a register of the students who had appeared to cast their vote (or failed to do so); in the medical college dormitory university officials themselves brought students to the polling station and gave them ‘detailed instructions’ (Golos 2007). In Orel, professors at the state university had told students to ‘vote for United Russia or face dismissal’; they had also been told to vote at a polling station on the campus that would be supervised by a member of staff (there were even rumours that cameras had been hidden in polling stations to record how they had identified their preferences).24 In Ul'yanovsk, city officials were reportedly demanding lists of student non-voters from the university administration; and at the technical university, students had been instructed to photograph the ballot paper on their mobile phones so that they could demonstrate that they had done their duty.25

It was not only students who found themselves under this kind of obligation. In Yekaterinburg, workers were transported en bloc from the locomotive depot to the polling station, where they were added to a supplementary list and obliged to cast their ballots under the direct supervision of the depot manager and senior foreman (Golos 2008a, pp. 63–64). Golos found evidence that there had been particularly detailed supervision of staff in all forms of public employment as well as soldiers and students in many regions of the federation, suggesting the ‘systematic character of these violations’ (Golos 2008a, p. 60). Voting in ‘closed’ institutions, such as detention centres, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric institutions and the army, was especially open to external influence (Zalessky 2007, p. 17); but all state institutions were being pushed to secure the highest possible level of support for the Kremlin's favoured list of candidates. In Ul'yanovsk, staff in the city council were telephoned beforehand and ordered to participate, and then asked the following day how they had cast their ballots (an indignant staff member who insisted on the secrecy of the exercise was told ‘If we want to know, we'll find out’). Leading officials spent the whole day in their offices receiving assurances from subordinates; many reported in person. There had been ‘nothing of the kind in Soviet times’, a senior member of the university staff told Novye izvestiya; ‘At any rate, we were never telephoned before and asked how we had voted’.26

There were also more positive inducements. In Chita and Omsk, voters were offered a free consultation with a gynaecologist or urologist in the polling station itself. In Nizhnii Novgorod the local authorities organised a free legal advice service, while in Kemerovo voters were invited to sample a variety of cheeses and spirits, although not more than 100 grammes a person. In Vladivostok, groups of attractive young ladies were stationed along the roadside with placards asking for ‘a lift to the elections’, and offering a nominal reward to anyone who would assist them.27 At a town in the Tomsk region everyone who had voted by 2.00 p.m. was promised a present, and students were offered free railway tickets. Turnout, ‘not surprisingly’, was about 80% (Golos 2008a, p. 64). In Buryatiya two of the candidates provided free alcohol, and the director of a local meat factory, who was a member of the United Russia list, organised the sale of sausage throughout the constituency at greatly reduced prices.28 In St Petersburg a prize lottery had been set up at the entrance to one of the polling stations with tickets that were designed to look like ballot papers, and with the number 10—which was United Russia's number on the ballot paper itself—already selected (Golos 2008a, p. 63).

Some, indeed, were paid directly for their assistance. In oil-rich Tyumen' region, United Russia voters were offered as much as R1,000 a vote (or about $41).29 In Moscow, plainclothes officers were reportedly offering R700 a time for a United Russia vote.30 In another report, a group of Moscow students had been offered R500 each for their support: ‘They filled in some kind of form—name, surname and passport data. They were given the numbers of polling stations where they should go and vote and get the cash’ (Harding & Parfitt 2007, p. 24). In Tambov, United Russia supporters were being given R100 if they could demonstrate that they had voted accordingly on their mobile phones. There were also rewards in kind. In the Kemerovo region, United Russia officials were distributing free beer and vodka and handing out tickets to the local circus and ice-hockey stadium (Kriger 2008, pp. 8, 9), while at a polling station in the Novgorod region, pensioners were being offered expensive tableware if they cast a ballot that had already been prepared for them in favour of the United Russia list of candidates: ‘When we saw they were actually giving away the plates, we couldn't believe it’, one of them told journalists.31

Threats and warnings, however, were rather more common. In Naberezhnye chelny, for instance, workers at the massive KamAZ factory had been threatened with dismissal unless they voted for United Russia, with factory officials on duty in the polling stations themselves and the mayor insisting on his right to conduct an ‘analysis’ of the way local people had distributed their preferences (Kriger 2008, p. 8). In the Moscow suburbs, the parents of a group of school pupils had been warned that unless they obtained absentee certificates and voted at particular polling stations, their children might have ‘problems in their examinations’ (Kriger 2008, p. 8). In Ufa, the entire workforce of a power station were forced to obtain absentee ballots and vote at a particular polling station, ‘all together for United Russia … . On every shift, in every department we are constantly being told that if you don't comply, you'll get the sack’ (Harding & Parfitt 2007, p. 24). In Novosibirsk, United Russia canvassers compiled a ‘blacklist’ of local people who had refused to promise their support; ‘We know where you live and we are going to add you to that list’, potential dissidents had been told (Harding & Parfitt 2007, p. 24). In another case, staff at a school in Ulan Ude were called into the classroom and asked to sign a declaration that they would vote for United Russia; otherwise, one of them told journalists, ‘I could lose my job’ (Harding & Parfitt 2007, p. 24).

There was further evidence from across the country that the casting of ballots had often been irregular. In some cases it was simply the absence of curtains around the voting booth, or the presence of election agitation of a kind that was not permitted on polling day itself. It had been ‘typical’, for instance, for several people to use the polling booth at the same time, and there had been minor inaccuracies in the electoral register, although fewer than on previous occasions (Golos 2008a, p. 63). There had been pictures of President Putin at many polling stations, which was not compatible with his position at the head of one of the lists of candidates in the Duma election, and at Archangel airport United Russia commercials had been shown on polling day, which was an obvious infringement. At one of the polling stations in Chelyabinsk there had even been a photographer inside the voting booth itself. In Kemerovo there had been open stalls instead of booths of the conventional kind, and in one polling station local social welfare staff had been advising voters how to cast their ballots (Kriger 2008, p. 9). Golos, all the same, reported that at ‘most polling stations’ the vote had taken place in a ‘calm atmosphere’, and that in ‘practically all polling stations’ the necessary conditions had been established for it to take place in secret (2008a, p. 63).

Much more important, for Golos and other observers, was a series of more considerable violations, including multiple voting and the misuse of absentee certificates and of the provision for voting at home. In a particularly egregious case at a polling station in Moscow, a group of up to 70 had arrived all together on a bus, declaring themselves to be temporary residents and demanding that their names be added to the supplementary register. It took an hour or more for all the formalities to be completed, after which they were all allowed to cast a ballot. The same group, using the same bus, had reportedly appeared at five other polling stations in the same area; they had voted, according to Golos observers, ‘at least six times’ (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 177). In another case, this time in Dagestan, a single voter had managed to vote five times using different forms of documentation (Kriger 2008, p. 9). In Chelyabinsk one of Golos's own activists had been able to vote twice, the first time at a railway station where the homeless and transit passengers were being accommodated, the second time at his home address (Golos 2008a, p. 72). One of Novaya gazeta's reporters was also allowed to vote a second time after he appeared at another polling station without an absentee certificate but promising to vote for United Russia (Kriger 2008, p. 9).

Election officials might sometimes be part of the conspiracy, as when voters appeared at polling stations and showed their passport but were assigned a ballot paper that properly belonged to another elector. They might, for instance, be given the ballot paper of one of the young men who were serving at the same time in the armed forces, or one of the ‘dead souls’ they had somehow ‘forgotten’ to remove from the electoral register. Falsification of this kind was very difficult for observers to detect, commented Novaya gazeta: ‘outwardly it look[ed] entirely honest’, and the ‘electoral Stakhanovite’, having cast his false ballot paper, could go on to another polling station and do the same. What if all the staff at the polling station were honest? In this case use could be made of the people who visited polling stations not just to vote, but also to earn some money. Voters of this kind could take the ballot paper out to the street, have it filled in by a sponsor, and then put it into the ballot box. This was a technique of the early 1990s, when it was called the karusel' or roundabout; in its updated version voters could simply take a photograph of the completed ballot paper on their mobile phone and collect the reward on their way out.32 A member of the CEC itself conceded that it had become a ‘common practice’.33

Another problem was widespread misuse of the absentee certificate (otkrepitel'noe udostoverenie), which allowed voters to be added to a supplementary list in another constituency if they were away from home on polling day. In one Moscow constituency, every single polling station reported identical numbers of voters making use of this facility (Kriger 2008, p. 9). There were also many reports of abuse of the facility that allowed voters to make use of mobile ballot boxes because of ill health or other circumstances that obliged them to remain at home. In Pskov, United Russia activists had apparently compiled a list of the citizens who were to be registered to vote in this way on the basis of their canvassing returns; in the event, more than 10% of local electors made use of the opportunity to do so (Kriger 2008). In Khabarovsk, members of an electoral commission itself were found to have completed 24 applications for the use of the mobile ballot box on behalf of the residents of a local old people's home, in an attempt to raise turnout levels; four of the supposed applicants later insisted they had made no such application, three could not have written anything at all as they were blind, and one had died the day before (Kriger 2008, p. 9). Nationwide, very much larger numbers were reported to have voted in these non-standard ways than ever before.

There were also some old-fashioned reports of ballot stuffing. Most often, it was a case of a suspiciously large numbers of ballot papers with a sequence of votes for the same party or candidate, or votes that appeared to have been cast before the polls had opened (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, pp. 177–81), but there were also more spectacular cases. In Dagestan, for instance, a group of about 50 had appeared at a polling station in the republican capital, accompanied by two armed bodyguards, and cast about 300 ballots. Later the same day in the same polling station an armed gang seized ballot papers from the table at which election commission officials had been sitting, completed them and put them into the ballot box (Kriger 2008, p. 9). In another case in Moscow, independent monitors had found a fully stuffed ballot box and were guarding it when an alarm went off and police ordered them to leave the building. When they came back representatives of the Prosecutor-General's Office appeared and confiscated the suspicious box, and ‘nothing was heard about it again’ (Coalson 2008). There were even cases in which election observers who had drawn attention to ballot stuffing were themselves obliged to leave the premises, placed under arrest and threatened with criminal prosecution (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, pp. 163–64).

In principle, the presence of national and sometimes international observers was a means of ensuring the integrity of the entire exercise, but as these examples have suggested, it was not an entirely reliable guarantee. The ‘crude and unpunished violation’ of the rights of election observers and other participants was already a familiar phenomenon at the local level; in the December 2007 election, according to Buzin and Lyubarev, abuses of this kind had taken place ‘across the whole country’. All kinds of pretexts had been used to deny observers the rights they were entitled to enjoy, or in some cases no pretext at all. Sometimes observers had been forced to leave as soon as they discovered an infringement, and sometimes ‘just in case’; and there were ‘numerous cases’ of observers being forced to leave before the count took place (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, pp. 162–63). There were also ‘pseudo-observers’, who actually represented the regime itself (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 168). Journalists faced additional difficulties when they attempted to gain access to the count, or to photograph the proceedings; and ‘when they attempted to defend their rights by citing articles of the current legislation, [they] were detained by the police’ (Golos 2008a, p. 64). In the case of the correspondents who worked for the Golos newspaper, the difficulties they encountered had evidently been ‘coordinated at the regional level’ (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 163).

Golos itself had considerable difficulties in the course of its observations on polling day. One of their representatives, who had been photographing a voting booth in Kareliya with party propaganda on it, was accused of distributing the material himself and arrested. Law enforcement officials meanwhile gained access to the Golos office, seized its computers and closed it down. It was the same in Samara, where Golos representatives were accused of using illegal computer programmes. In some cases Golos activists were pressured to withdraw from the organisation, and on ‘various pretexts’ other activists were detained on polling day itself.34 An independent observer, Grigorii Belonuchkin, was beaten so badly after he had found irregularities in the vote count in his local constituency that he ended up in hospital. He had published an article in Kommersant-vlast' claiming that the results in two polling stations in Dolgoprudy, on the outskirts of Moscow, had been fabricated to the advantage of United Russia; he began to pursue the matter through the courts but then received a number of threatening phone calls in which he was told to ‘keep quiet and stay away from the March 2 presidential election’, and was badly beaten by unknown assailants.35

The count was another opportunity to achieve the right result. Commission members, for instance, could swap the piles of votes for the various parties and then ‘count them out in front of observers as if nothing had happened’ (Zalessky 2007, p. 18). A ‘modernised version of this method’ was to attach a ballpoint refill to your finger and put a tick on the ballot papers that voters had forgotten to complete. Or alternatively, to spoil a ballot paper on which a vote had been cast for an opponent of the authorities, for instance, by adding another tick (Zalessky 2007, p. 18). Much more common, in the view of seasoned observers, was the identification of ‘errors’ in the first set of results, allowing a ‘corrected’ version to be prepared in which the results that were required could easily be inserted; observers might be forced to leave the room at this point, or not informed that a new protocol was being prepared. The computer-based system GAS Vybory was not, apparently, open to manipulation, and any ‘corrections’ of this kind had to be made before the results were entered (Zalessky 2007). In one Moscow polling station, according to Golos representatives, the lights went out for three or four minutes as the votes were being counted; in a St Petersburg polling station there were allegations that votes had been given a preliminary ‘check’ by a higher authority over the telephone (Golos 2007).

Novaya gazeta reported the disturbing experience of Ol'ga Pokrovskaya, a St Petersburg lawyer with many years of service on electoral commissions, who had spent all day at one of the city's polling stations during the 2008 presidential contest. She duly received a signed copy of the final protocol at the end of the count and offered to give the staff a lift in her car to the territorial election commission, where the results were to be entered into the official record. She noticed, however, that one of the officials was carrying a blank election protocol that had already been stamped and signed, in addition to the completed protocol of which she had been given a copy, and when they arrived at the territorial electoral commission she discovered that all the protocols were being ‘checked’ behind closed doors before they were included. She later compared her own protocol with the figures that had been officially reported: they were identical, except that turnout had increased from 965 to 1,641, and the vote for Medvedev from 620 to 1,412 (the figures for the other candidates were unchanged). Similar methods, Pokrovskaya concluded, must have been used at other polling stations as well. There had not been many observers—at her own polling station she was the only one—and this had allowed local officials ‘unlimited opportunities’ to report whatever results they wanted.36

Golos prepared an analysis of the reports that had been sent in over their ‘hot line’ during polling day itself. The most common violation, according to these reports, was restrictions on the rights of observers and media representatives (23% of all cases); illegal campaigning was almost as common (22%), followed by irregularities with the electoral register (15%), ‘other’ violations (another 15%), pressure on voters (11%), and violations of the secrecy requirements (9%) (Golos 2007). Golos activists themselves recorded a rather different pattern, for the most part because their observations covered the entire election period and not just polling day (Table 4). It was certainly clear that the techniques of ‘compulsion’ and ‘falsification’ were quite distinct. During the campaign period, it was the unequal basis on which parties and candidates had been obliged to compete in the mass media that attracted the most criticism, followed by the pressure to vote and other forms of ‘administrative resource’. On polling day itself it was attempts to damage other parties and candidates by illegitimate means that drew the most attention, but ‘administrative resource’ in its various forms was also important; perhaps surprisingly, there were also frequent references to the incitement of hatred towards other election participants and groups of citizens.

TABLE 4 
Election Violations according to Golos Observers

Over the campaign period	%	On polling day	%
Domination of the media by particular parties	47	‘Black PR’	19
Instructions to enterprises and institutions to vote for a particular party	32	Incitement of hatred towards other election participants and groups	18
Campaigning in higher education institutions, government offices and enterprises	30	State and municipal employees campaigning in working time	14
Public declarations by leading state officials in favour of a particular party	28	Difficulties for parties in distributing their publicity	14
Campaigning in favour of a particular party by government representatives and others	28	Pressure to vote for particular parties in colleges, state bodies and enterprises	13
Source: adapted from Golos (2008a, p. 61). Golos representatives also noted the following on election day: denial of media access to particular parties, and the bribery of electors (both 12%), damage to or destruction of election materials (11%), use of public resources by particular parties (10%), and the arrest of party candidates or activists (9%).

An increasingly salient feature of the Russian election experience was the proportion of voters who exercised their rights outside a polling station, or at least their local polling station. The procedure for early voting was regulated by article 76 of the election law, which allowed votes to be cast up to 15 days beforehand in ‘inaccessible or distant localities, on ships that on polling day [were] at sea, at polar stations’, or at polling stations ‘outside the boundaries of the Russian Federation’. The numbers involved, however, were no more than 0.2% of the total in the December 2007 Duma contest, and less than that in the December 2008 presidential contest. Very much larger and rapidly increasing numbers voted on the basis of the absentee certificate, a procedure that was regulated by article 74 of the law and which was intended to cater for electors who were ‘unable to visit the polling station in the constituency in which [they were] included in the electoral register’, allowing them to vote elsewhere. Not all of those who obtained an absentee certificate actually used it (74% in December 2007); but more than twice as many voters made use of this facility as had done so four years earlier, and there were even larger numbers in the presidential election the following March (Vybory 2008a, p. 64; 2008b, p. 126).

Much larger numbers again made use of mobile ballot boxes, by which election officials visited voters in their homes or hospital wards or indeed places of detention because their personal circumstances did not allow them to visit a polling station themselves (arrangements of this kind were covered in article 77 of the law). More than four million voters took part on this basis in the December 2007 Duma election, and more than five million in March 2008 (see Table 5). In the Duma election this represented more than 6% of the total vote, and in some cases the proportions were higher still: up to 19.3% in Voronezh, 14.7% in Tambov and 13.6% in the Agin-Buryat autonomous district (Vybory 2008a, p. 65). The effect of these and other arrangements, taken together, was to reduce the proportion of the electorate that cast their vote in a conventional polling station under the watchful eye of independent observers, and to drive up the proportion that cast their vote in circumstances in which the secrecy and indeed integrity of the ballot were much less likely to be assured. In December 2007, 69,537,065 electors cast a valid or invalid ballot, but of these, just 64,962,476 were cast in a polling station on polling day; more than four and half million (4,574,589 or 6.6%) were cast beforehand, without appearing in person, or in another constituency. All of these were voting methods that allowed much greater opportunities to the authorities to influence the process, and in every case the numbers had increased substantially.

TABLE 5 
Non-Standard Forms of Voting in Duma Elections, 1995–2007

	1995	1999	2003	2007
Early voting	462,461	68,122	74,182	147,966
Percent of total vote	0.67	0.10	0.12	0.21
Absentee certificates	n.d.	441,588	572,965	1,169,149
Percent of total vote	n.d.	0.66	0.94	1.68
Mobile boxes	3,205,501	2,859,879	3,392,631	4,428,022
Percent of total vote	4.63	4.29	5.60	6.37
Source: adapted from Vybory (1996, 2000, 2004, 2008a).

For what appears to be the first time, one of the members of the Central Electoral Commission itself issued a dissenting opinion to express his dissatisfaction with the Duma election that had just concluded. They had not, in fact, been ‘free elections’, charged law professor Yevgenii Kolyushin. Despite the provisions of the law, a ‘whole series’ of representative bodies throughout the Russian regions had called for the support of ‘one of the parties’. The election itself had been presented as a referendum on President Putin, which was legally improper. The presence of a large number of leading officials on one of the lists of candidates had given it a ‘privileged position in relation to other parties’. For whatever reason, the size of the electorate had increased by more than a million and a half since 1 July 2007 in a country whose total population was known to be declining (Kolyushin 2007). ‘The main reason was that the same voters were counted twice’, Kolyushin told the Supreme Court when he testified the following year in support of the Communist Party's attempt to challenge the results; ‘Where else could they have come from?’ Decisions on complaints had been taken by ‘top CEC officials based on unknown criteria’, and for the first time in his 13 years on the Commission he had been obliged to ask for documents to be provided to him, including reports from regional electoral commissions.37

Conclusions

Had any of these forms of improper influence, in fact, made any difference to the outcome? Even the Kremlin's opponents did not suggest that December 2007 or March 2008 had been a ‘stolen election’. Reporting to the Duma shortly after the parliamentary election had taken place, CEC head Vladimir Churov was able to tell the newly elected deputies that the ‘preliminary sociological investigations’ that had been conducted by ‘ten independent organisations’, the exit poll that had been conducted by two independent services, and the parallel vote count that one of the parties had itself conducted, had ‘almost completely coincided’ with the results that had been officially declared (‘Vystuplenie’ 2007). The observation mission from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe, in their otherwise critical report, accepted that the elections had been ‘well organised’ and that there had been ‘significant technical improvements’ as compared with earlier exercises. On election day itself the polling stations had ‘seemed well-run, although they were at times crowded’, voting had taken place in a ‘mostly calm and friendly atmosphere’, and election officials had been ‘generally welcoming’ although there had also been some ‘over-zealous policemen’ (‘Russian Duma elections’ 2007).

More scholarly investigations suggested a rather different verdict. Myagkov and colleagues, using a largely econometric methodology, concluded that ‘anywhere between 20 and 25 percent of United Russia's [2007] vote’ had been ‘won in a way that would not pass muster in an established or traditional democracy’ (Myagkov et al. 2009, p. 137; their verdict on the 2008 presidential election is presented elsewhere in this collection). The veteran election analyst Viktor Sheinis concluded similarly that the reported turnout had been at least 10% higher than had actually been achieved (and in some regions the difference had been very much more than this). The vote for United Russia had also been about 12–15% higher than had actually been the case (a difference of five million voters). Conversely, the vote for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation had almost certainly been 2–5 percentage points higher than the 11.6% that had been officially reported, and the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko should have had two or three times more than 0.96 and 1.59%, respectively. It was certainly difficult otherwise to understand how a party like Civic Force (Grazhdanskaya sila), which had conducted no campaign and was little known outside the big cities, could have secured more votes (1.05%) than the Union of Right Forces (Sheinis 2008, p. 50).

Golos, in a more cautiously worded commentary, argued that the degree of falsification was certainly sufficient to have exaggerated the United Russia vote by at least 3%, which meant that it would otherwise have had 15 fewer seats. This, in turn, meant that the party would still have achieved a majority, but not the two-thirds supermajority that allowed it to put through all forms of legislation, including constitutional amendments (Golos 2008a, p. 72). Others agreed that the increase in direct falsification—personation, multiple voting and misrepresentation of the results, all of which were criminal offences—had become part of a ‘massive administrative electoral technology’ that had begun to have a significant influence on the distribution of votes among the candidates and parties, if not necessarily on the outcome. There was no question, argued Buzin and Lyubarev, that Dmitri Medvedev would have won the presidential contest under any circumstances; but the parties that had been in competition with United Russia in December 2007 would have strengthened their positions if they had not been obliged to operate at such a disadvantage, and United Russia would almost certainly have been unable to achieve the two-thirds majority that allowed it to take any decisions it wished without regard to the views of the other parties (2008, p. 176).

Conclusions of this kind, for comparativists, were just the beginning of the matter. What, for instance, about thresholds? What was the point above which an election became ‘free and fair’, and how could it be measured? What, for instance, if an election was judged ‘free but not fair’, as the Council of Europe had concluded in its report on the previous parliamentary election in December 2003 (‘Russian elections’ 2003)? Or even ‘fair but not free’? In principle, there was a basis for such a judgement in the range of international conventions to which Russia and other countries were formally a party; but they did not generate a ‘score’, nor could it easily be demonstrated, even in a single country, that the quality of elections had ‘improved’ or ‘deteriorated’ over a period of time. Again in principle, an international monitoring body that had the respect of all parties might have been allowed to reach such judgements, but the experience of the Russian elections in 2007–2008 made it less likely than ever before that any judgements of this kind would be accepted, and there were calls soon afterwards for a measure of ‘reciprocity’ that would allow Russian-sponsored bodies to make judgements about elections in other countries on the same kind of basis (Muehlboeck 2008). Western countries, after all, had serious issues of their own in such matters as campaign finance, hanging chads and (sometimes) open abuses. Nor were matters assisted by the failure of the relevant international organisations, above all the Council of Europe and the OSCE, to adopt a common position.

Did any of this matter, at least, for the stability of government? The evidence of other studies was that Russians generally regarded their 2007–2008 elections as ‘fair’, and that in any case their view of the fairness of the election had little to do with procedural niceties. ‘The fairness of an election’, write Rose and Mishler, ‘is only one reason for political commitment, and in Russia it is outweighed by government performance’ (2008, p. 120). Views of ‘elections’ had certainly to be disaggregated: not just into presidential and parliamentary but into regional and national, and between both of these and local or municipal elections, where a more competitive environment prevailed even though there was some evidence the authorities were attempting to extinguish it (Ross 2009). Not even the national election law was a fixed quantity, given the moves that took place under the Medvedev presidency to extend a degree of representation to parties that had fallen short of the 7% threshold (‘O vnesenii’ 2009), and to allow them greater access to the media (‘O garantiyakh’ 2009). Indeed the entire political system needed ‘some form of modernisation’, Medvedev told a meeting of the State Council in January 2010, but accusations of widespread electoral falsification had not been confirmed and indiscriminate criticism of the electoral system was itself a form of ‘legal nihilism’.38 All that had changed, by the end of the year, was that the procedure for early voting had become more restrictive (‘O vnesenii’ 2010).

There were still deeper issues about the ‘meaning’ of such exercises. How did participants themselves conceive of ‘the political’, for instance? What was the salience of the electoral mechanism within it? Some argued that the resolution of differences by the articulation of individual preferences was culturally specific to the developed West. Russians, and the Slavic world in general, might have different values, related to their Orthodox religion, within which consensus and collectivism were rather more important (see for instance Sergeev & Biryukov 1993). How meaningful, in any case, was a ‘national’ dimension in any matters of this kind, at a time when the services that mattered to ordinary people were mostly delivered at a local level? Yet how otherwise were ordinary people to secure any change in the larger issues that concerned them, such as corruption and consumer prices? Elections were the central mechanism that brought government and citizens together, in Russia as in other countries; but they were going to become less frequent, and they were increasingly managed from above. In these circumstances, how would ordinary people express their dissatisfaction, if they had any? For the moment, with high oil prices, there were correspondingly high levels of support for the Putin–Medvedev leadership. If economic circumstances changed it was likely that Russia would show more of the limitations as well as the absorptive capacity of its ‘authoritarian elections’.

Notes

The support of the UK Economic and Social Council under grants RES-000-22-2532 and RES-062-23-1378 is gratefully acknowledged, as is the support made available by the Leverhulme Foundation through its Major Research Fellowship F/00 179/AR. The Carnegie Trust of the Universities of Scotland made possible two fieldwork visits to Moscow in December 2007 and March 2008. Research assistance was provided by Tat'yana Biletskaya and Valentina Feklyunina.

¹For an overview of these and other changes see Luchin et al. (2010).

²For a comprehensive account see White (2011).

³There is a substantial, often practically-oriented Russian literature on ‘election technologies’: see for instance Malkin and Suchkov (2002). The wider context in Russia and the other post-Soviet republics is considered in Wilson (2005).

⁴ Vestnik Tsentral'noi izbiratel'noi komissii Rossiiskoi Federatsii, no. 19, 2007, pp. 28–38. The governor in question, Anatolii Lisitsyn of Yaroslavl', was the first who had ever chosen to become a deputy rather than disavow his seat; the Kremlin was thought to have made him an offer he ‘could not refuse’ (Izvestiya, 14 December 2007, p. 2).

⁵ Nezavisimaya gazeta, 29 November 2007, p. 3.

⁶ RBK Daily, 23 May 2008, p. 2.

⁷Other studies reached very similar conclusions: the Centre for Research in the Political Culture of Russia, for instance, found that United Russia had received 63% of all the coverage that was devoted to political parties in November 2007 on the six main political channels; on the First Channel and Rossiya, with the largest audiences, it was 69% and 72%, respectively. Other parties, among them, had no more than 5–8% on any channel (Sheinis 2008, p. 48).

⁸ Nezavisimaya gazeta, 4 March 2008, p. 20.

⁹ Rossiiskaya gazeta, 28 February 2008, p. 3.

¹⁰These figures are based on a national representative survey conducted by Russian Research for Stephen White and Ian McAllister with the assistance of the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the Australian Research Council under grants RES-000-22-2532 and LX0883137. Fieldwork took place between 30 January and 27 February 2008; 2,000 respondents were interviewed face-to-face in their own homes.

¹¹ Vremya novostei, 4 December 2007, p. 2.

¹² Kommersant, 9 April 2007, p. 4; speaking to journalists later in the year, Churov reformulated his ‘first law’ as ‘Putin is always right, because he always observes the law’ (Novye izvestiya, 27 July 2007, p. 4).

¹³ Rossiiskaya gazeta, 29 October 2007, p. 1.

¹⁴ Rossiiskaya gazeta, 28 January 2008, p. 3.

¹⁵ Izvestiya, 2 February 2007, p. 3.

¹⁶ Izvestiya, 12 December 2007, p. 3.

¹⁷ Sunday Telegraph, 26 November 2007, p. 37; Moscow Times, 4 December 2007, p. 3.

¹⁸ Kommersant, 26 November 2007, p. 3.

¹⁹ Moscow Times, 4 December 2007, p. 3.

²⁰ Nezavisimaya gazeta, 20 July 2007, p. 1.

²¹ Kommersant, 9 July 2008, p. 3.

²² Vedomosti, 23 January 2008, p. A02.

²³ New Times, 26 November 2007, p. 17.

²⁴ Moscow Times, 27 November 2007, p. 2.

²⁵ Novye izvestiya, 4 December 2007, p. 2.

²⁶ Novye izvestiya, 4 December 2007, p. 2.

²⁷ Nezavisimaya gazeta, 19 February 2008, p. 21.

²⁸ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 4 December 2007, p. 1.

²⁹ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 4 December 2007, p. 1.

³⁰ Moscow Times, 3 December 2007, p. 3.

³¹ Moscow Times, 3 December 2007, p. 3.

³² Novaya gazeta, 26 November 2007, pp. 17–18. The most extensive falsification of this kind appeared to have taken place in Ingushetia, which reported a turnout of 98.35% in December 2007 and a 98.72% vote in favour of United Russia. This extraordinary display of unanimity precipitated a popular campaign, ‘I didn't vote’, which was launched by an oppositional website. Within a month it had reportedly been endorsed by 54% of the republic's entire electorate, including more than 80% of those who had been eligible to vote in the president's own home town (Kommersant, 16 January 2008, p. 3). The website director, Magomed Yevloev, was killed while in police custody the following August; the human rights organisation Memorial described it as a ‘political murder’ (Trud, 2 September 2008, p. 5).

³³ Novaya gazeta, 6 March 2008, p. 6.

³⁴ Novaya gazeta, 6 December 2007, p. 3.

³⁵ Moscow Times, 8 April 2008, p. 3; his own account appeared in Belonuchkin (2007), and there is a discussion in Buzin and Lyubarev (2008, pp. 188–94).

³⁶ Novaya gazeta, 6 March 2008, p. 6.

³⁷ Kommersant, 12 July 2008, p. 2.

³⁸ Izvestiya, 25 January 2010, p. 2.